BY BRADEN CARTWRIGHT
Daily Post Staff Writer
Palo Alto Councilwoman Julie Lythcott-Haims had an affair with a female undergrad half her age while she was a dean at Stanford, leading her to resign from the university, the student said in an essay detailing their year-long relationship.
Former Mayor Liz Kniss, who said she continues to support Lythcott-Haims, said the affair will inevitably lead people to ask whether Lythcott-Haims should resign from council.
“There are going to be those people who say, ‘Oh now I’m worried about her judgment,’” Kniss said. “As of today, this is in Julie’s court. This is her decision to make about how she wants to handle it.”
LaDoris Cordell, a retired judge and former councilwoman, said she found Lythcott-Haims’ conduct to be “very troubling” after reading the essay.
“I’m disappointed. I expected better.” Cordell said.
Former Mayor Larry Klein said Lythcott-Haims should stay on council.
“If we’re going to disqualify people for making wrong decisions that are nowhere close to criminal, we’re probably going to have very few people eligible to serve,” Klein said yesterday.
Stanford Law School professor and “Me Too” activist Michelle Dauber criticized the university yesterday.
“Stanford needs to do a better job protecting all students from inappropriate behavior,” Dauber said in a text message.
‘Inappropriate’
Lythcott-Haims declined an interview yesterday, instead emailing a statement that confirmed the affair and apologized to her family and former colleagues.
“While I was not in a position of authority over her grades or academic status at the university, being in a relationship with a student was inappropriate when it happened 13 years ago, and it would be inappropriate now,” Lythcott-Haims said in her statement.
The ‘celebrity’ dean
The student — Olivia Haas, of New York City — said she was 22 at the time, and she had never been with a woman before.
“The dean was a school celebrity — charismatic, adored — and I was the kind of young person who craved attention from powerful people. When a close friendship between us turned physically intimate, I was convinced I was in love and so I lived a double life,” Haas said in her essay, published Wednesday on a website for LGBTQ+ writers called Autostraddle.
Haas recapped the affair in detail, talking about the clothes they wore, the food they ate and the sex they had — at luxury hotels, nearby motels and a cabin “hours south of campus” where the affair began.
“I barely knew my own body, but I did what I imagined felt good,” Haas wrote.
Lythcott-Haims said she checked the university’s policies and they weren’t breaking any rules, “but it was clear that what we were doing put her job at risk,” Haas said.
Haas said she drifted away from her peers while carrying the secret, and only one friend ever expressed skepticism about her public closeness to the Lythcott-Haims.
“It’s weird,” the friend said, according to the essay.
Haas worked as an admissions associate from 2010 to 2012, according to her LinkedIn. Lythcott-Haims was dean of freshman and dean of undergraduate advising at Stanford from 2002 to 2012.
“We’d been writing and recording music together and got to a point where we expressed love for each other,” Lythcott-Haims said in her statement yesterday. “That is where it should have ended. I should not have taken it further.”
Long-distance relationship
The affair continued after Haas graduated in 2012 and moved to New York City. She said she kept getting letters and poems from Lythcott-Haims “nearly every week, never signing her name.”
Haas said she mailed Lythcott-Haims a pair of her unwashed underwear.
“I wanted to compensate for how my messages often fell short of her libidinal desires,” Haas wrote.
Lythcott-Haims flew out to Haas in the fall of 2012, and they stayed in a cottage together and had more sex, Haas said.
Lythcott-Haims’ husband knew about the affair, Haas said.
“Just don’t buy her a car,” he once joked to her, Haas recalled.
Haas said she ended the relationship with Lythcott-Haims after confessing to her boyfriend and deciding to be with him.
Haas told her parents
When Haas told her parents about the affair, she said they were “horrified,” and there was a lot of yelling in the house.
“Suddenly words like ‘manipulated’ and ‘abuse of power’ were being used … I began to see my great love story through a very different lens,” Haas said.
Haas said her mom anonymously told Stanford about what Lythcott-Haims did.
“You can’t see that she used you,” Haas recalled her mother saying.
Haas said she watched with “quiet grief” as Lythcott-Haims went on to write three New York Times bestselling books after leaving Stanford. Haas listened to Lythcott-Haims’ podcast interviews, wondering if she would hear their story.
“Part of this grief, I think, comes from wondering where I might be now if I’d poured all that energy and effort into my own story instead of ours,” Haas wrote.
Private apology
Lythcott-Haims emailed Haas in the early months of the pandemic to privately apologize.
They got back in touch, “although some days I’m not sure we should be,” Haas said.
Haas said until recently, she lived a few miles from Lythcott-Haims’ house in the Barron Park neighborhood.
“I never ran into her, but my pulse always quickened when I would pull into the parking lot of the grocery chain where we both shopped,” Haas said.
Haas didn’t return a request for an interview yesterday. She said on social media that she started writing the essay three years ago and published it through a writer residency in Vermont.
Stanford spokeswoman Luisa Rapport yesterday declined to comment on the story.
Stanford tightens rules
Stanford updated its policies in December 2013 to outright ban consensual relationships between faculty members and students.
“These relationships are often less consensual than the individual whose position confers power or authority believes,” the policy states.
Before the 2013 ban, Stanford’s sexual harassment policy “strongly discouraged” relationships between faculty and students and required anyone in a “position of greater authority or power” to report relationships to their supervisors.
“We’re trying to have people recognize that it is not in line with the academic mission of the university to have people engaging in unprofessional relationships,” professor Laraine Zappert told Stanford Magazine when the policy was approved in November 2002.
Political career
Lythcott-Haims was elected to Palo Alto City Council in November 2022 on a platform of allowing developers to build more housing.
Lythcott-Haims ran for Congresswoman Anna Eshoo’s seat earlier this year and finished in eighth out of 11 candidates. She won three precincts, all on Stanford’s campus.
Four seats are currently up for grabs on Palo Alto City Council in November. Lythcott-Haims has two years left in office, and she can only be removed through a resignation or a voter recall.
Lythcott-Haims has endorsed Planning Commissioner George Lu in the race.
Councilman Pat Burt and Mayor Greer Stone are running to keep their seats. Neither candidate returned a request for comment yesterday about what Lythcott-Haims should do.
Former Mayor Liz Kniss said that she is waiting to see how Lythcott-Haims responds, or if more stories will come out.
“Right now, I feel like I’ve just started to peel the egg and haven’t seen what’s on the inside yet,” Kniss said. “No one has said anything more than sort of like, ‘OMG.’”
Larry Klein, the only man quoted, seems to not have heard of “me too”. His dismissiveness is totally inappropriate given the facts.
She covered- up, never telling voters in her 2 election campaigns anything about this, which shows lack of character, judgment and integrity. She likely wouldn’t have been elected for city council.
She told us she left Stanford to go back to school when she was actually forced out.
Maybe this finally being made public after a decade of silence will stop people looking to JLH to tell them how to be adults and parents, how to live, and they will stop giving her money!
The comments by Kniss and Klein and the refusal of Stanford to comment speak volumes about their values and priorities.
“Former Mayor Liz Kniss said that she is waiting to see how Lythcott-Haims responds, or if more stories will come out.
“Right now, I feel like I’ve just started to peel the egg and haven’t seen what’s on the inside yet,” Kniss said. “No one has said anything more than sort of like, ‘OMG.’”
OMG, MS Kniss, did you miss all the online comments in the same way you missed that Palo Alto has traffic problems?? OMG, we know what’s inside the egg and that your “values” are showing.
JHL — a Harvard-trained lawyer — read the Stanford policies just as she read the policies about City Council members — and decided to risk violating them because she evidently believes she’s too special for them to apply to her.
Her egotism as a first-time City Council member in running against Joe Simitian knowing she had no chance of winning cost Palo Alto qualified Congressional representation just to indulge her ego and get her more publicity.
If the ARB commissioner can be forced out for stealing a flower pot and the Storm Drain Commissioner can be forced out for soliciting children for sex, why would Kniss and Klein tell us that JHL’s so special she’s exempt? A question worth exploring,
She was 22! That is not a child. Male predatory behavior is rampant, actual criminality and we’re focusing on this? The older one even apologized.
“If we’re going to disqualify people for making wrong decisions that are nowhere close to criminal, we’re probably going to have very few people eligible to serve,” Klein said yesterday. WOW, Larry, really?
Agreed! Such a low bar. I wonder what skeletons he has in his own closet?
This is a good article that has more information than other sources. I think both of them are mentally ill. I didn’t vote for JLH for City Council; she has no common sense. I was in a large group Zoom meeting and she started picking her nose. Did she forget that her camera was on? What a boor.
What a predator. We deserve better.
I’m grossed out by a Dean of Students having an affair with a student. Regardless of whether it was or was not against school policy, it was unethical. But as a Harvard-trained lawyer, she’s got a world-class education in how to weasel out of doing the right thing.
Now that this affair is public, JLH should run for Congress again – she’d fit right in.
I expect Dave Price to be all cranked up in his column on Monday. You mail recall his column during the council election season two years in which he wrote specifically against JLH’s council run.
As always, I expect that he will pull no punches on Monday.
And, as Palo Alto Online is now a non-profit and therefore is quite, if not completely, restricted in the editorials it can write, Price’s influence will be magnified
I was told by good authority that Title 9 violations (here) come with a 10-year ban from Stanford campus. That ban was applied to JLH when she resigned.
Deceived, while I hope you’re correct but the Stanford Daily article about her leaving makes it sound like everything was peachy=keen and gushed about how she’d be missed, how8 she was leaving to pursue her creative dreams, etc.
It’s against Daily Post policy to post external links but I urge you to seek it out. When I read it, it was so disgustingly sweet I felt like I needed insulin.
One thing we know about sexual predators is that they never strike just one victim. Julie got caught this time, but how many other times were there? How many victims?
Journalists should do some digging.
Bob Wenzlau was arrested for preying on girls a few years younger than Olivia. The difference is that Olivia is above the age of consent. But the age difference indicates a really unhealthy mentality.
What a messed up person. How dare she write books about how to be an adult.
How disgusting. They all need psychiatric help. “Just don’t buy her a car.” Who says that? And who mails unwashed underwear? The only thing normal is the parents yelling. I’d yell too.
Does Larry Klein have no moral compass or no children?
No parent wants their child’s first romantic memory to be that of a teacher thrice their age.
This Councilwoman endorsed George Lu as “one of my students when I was at Stanford”, yikes
Has anybody asked whether Lythcott-Haims was being blackmailed by Haas? Lythcott-Haims knows her behavior is offensive to voters because she kept it quiet for years. Did Haas — or somebody else who knew about the relationship — hold this over Lythcott-Haims’s head?
Once a predator, always a predator. Society needs to protect young people from Lythcott-Haims and make sure she does not hold any positions of authority.
I recently read Olivia Hussey’s autobiography, and her relationship with Zeffirelli is similar to this Olivia’s with Lythcott-Haims. After making her a star in ‘Romeo and Juliet’, where he made her feel special but also bullied her, Zeffirelli only gave her one more underwritten role, making little effort to help or advise her when she struggled w the mental impact of fame at 16. Despite claiming to have been in love w her, he did nothing for her once she was no longer useful. Obvs, Haas is 22, but Lythcott-Haims similarly made her feel special, but, despite saying her raison-d’etre is helping others (and that also being her job as dean), she was interested in using Olivia for sex, not in helping her or mentoring her in any way. She could probs have assisted Olivia’s career w contacts, and definitely encouraged her to take advantage of opportunities, but she was keener to pester her for sexts while she was struggling to earn a living. Disgusting woman. Her husband enabled this behaviour. I feel for their children, with a pair of sleazebags like this for parents!
The use of the word “children” in above comments is an insult to and infantilization of 22 yr. olds. The majority has had several sexual partners by that age. Some (myself included) have chosen life partners. A couple of my peers had started families by 22.
Was this a big ethical lapse and a terrible mistake? Yes! But it was not child abuse or predatory behavior–there are no children in this story.
What is Kniss talking about when she said she wondered if more stories about Lythcott-Haims would come out. What does she know?
Stanford University specifically put JLH in charge of young students. That position comes with a lot of moral trust. This was just not any position. The focus of this position was to guide young students as they made their way successfully through Stanford and into the world.
Stanford actually put a fox in the hen house.
I can understand Haas’ deteriorating feelings towards JLH, as she was dealing with the negative side of the whole affair while JLH became successful with writing a number of books on THE EXACT subjects of How to Raise an Adult (what an insult to Haas’ parents) and How to be an Adult (insult to Haas.) That is having chutzpah! The hypocrisy of it all!
So true Anneke Dempsey – she was the fox allowed in the hen house. What is going on in the mind of someone who holds a position of trust responsible for the welfare of young people – literally the “Dean of Freshman” and then a self-described expert on how to raise young people – only to sexually pursue a student and derailing that student’s life. This is really foul. Such an individual should not be representing us in any government capacity. And her publishers should drop her.